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Business:Entrepreneurship

Hiring the Right Person in the Wrong Seat with Thomas Brunskill of Forage

2022-10-27

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How often have you hired the right person for the wrong seat?

Here’s how that happens.

A person is identified and it is assumed that because of their background that they crush it for you. After all, they are already doing it for someone else.

Perfect logic, right? Nope!

The reason this logic is so dangerous for your company is that current skills are just a small part of success. As we have all experienced, by going above and beyond to land that “rockstar” from a name brand company. Only to have them crash and burn within the first 90 days.

To avoid this dilemma in the future, we simply need to understand the person’s desires and level of accomplishment first. Interviewing to understand, not to sell.

This produces much stronger evidence to predict of success of your new hire in your unique business.

Guest Bio:

Tom Brunskill is the co-founder and CEO of Forage which is changing the world of career discovery and skill building.

Before moving to San Francisco, Tom was a corporate lawyer at a multinational law firm in Australia. It was during his own career journey that Tom discovered that an education and a degree doesn’t necessarily translate to knowing how to do a specific job role. He also realized just how inequitable the education-to-workforce pathway is.

After observing the unfair advantage those with access to connections or educational opportunities had, Tom made it his mission to provide anyone the ability to learn skills through virtual job simulations produced by the world’s top companies,

By breaking down barriers to gaining workplace-specific skills.

Tom hopes to level the opportunity playing field and empower anyone to pursue their dream career.

TODAY WE DISCUSS

Why your company might be the wrong seat for the right candidate
How to avoid wrong seat hires

HIRING STORY

This isn’t a story about a hire we did make, but a hire we wanted to make and didn’t pull off.

We were building out our leadership team between our Series A and Series B. Obviously in an early-stage company, getting the right leaders into your organization is crucial. Leaders in early-stage environments have a disproportionate influence on the ultimate success or demise of a company so the stakes are high.

On this particular search for this VP role, I was finding it really tough. It was the middle of 2021 when start-ups were sitting on a record amount of capital and there was a real pinch finding exceptional talent...

Challenge?

Too many people end up in the wrong seats.
- Education on what the roles look like
- Gap between the candidate's perspective and what the role really is
- Realistic depiction of what it is like to work in the company
  - Attract the right people
  - Le
- Companies use the wrong signals when they hire
  - Schools, companies
  - Don't predict future success

Why is this important to the company?

High attrition 73% failure rate
SHRM reports that the cost of replacing an employee is approximately 33% of that employee’s salary
But that’s just the direct cost of having to find and replace that employee. It doesn’t take into account the indirect costs of a disengaged, non-aligned workforce.
My broader take is that recruitment processes traditionally focus on getting bums on seats rather than the right bums on the right seats. Until you figure out how to design a process that gets the right people into the right roles for the long-term, employers will continue losing millions in direct costs and lost productivity.

Rick’s Nuggets:

What a person desires needs to be discovered in the 1st conversation!
Do they get it, want it, and have the capacity to do it

How do we solve the problem?

Educate the candidate pipeline
- The recruitment process has typically worked as a ‘hire then train’ model. I believe that in an age of software employers should be training their candidates first then hiring. And this needs to start at the top of the funnel.
- This is a great model for both candidates and employers. If you take the time to educate your candidate pipeline on who your company actually is and what the roles truly entail, you are going to attract the right type of candidates rather than a large pool of applicants who have no real idea whether they truly want to work for you or not.
- Volume has become the enemy of quality. Too many HR tech companies and employers have focused on removing friction from the recruitment process in the pursuit of getting the maximum number of candidates. That’s dumb. I would argue that it’s actually far better to introduce positive friction - and education or a ‘try before you buy’ model is a great example of positive friction.
- What does education actually look like?
  - What are your values?
  - Who are your people?
  - What are you building? And why?
  - What does this specific role look like?
- Be authentic and realistic. Don’t sell a candidate a lemon otherwise you will end up with lemons. You don’t want your hires to turn up on day 1 and realize they’ve signed up to something which didn’t fit their expectations. Employers and candidates don’t win in that situation.
- The other great consequence of spending time educating your candidate pipeline is that you’re more likely to attract candidates from broad and diverse audiences.
Better hiring signals:
- So educating your candidate pipeline is the first crucial step towards getting the right person into the right seat. But then you have to look at the hiring signals you are using to hire candidates.
- My view is employers do a very poor job of what hiring signals they use to make a hire. I do a lot of work in early-talent recruitment where employers over-index your GPA, what school you went to, and other signals which statistically just don’t correlate to long-term success in a role. If they were indicative of success, you wouldn’t see 70% attrition.
- But even in start-up land I see this happen and I have fallen into the trap of this myself. The classic hiring signal trap in start-up land is over-indexing where someone was an early employee at a successful company. You will often hear a founder say ‘We just hired employee no #25 from Salesforce’. I have found out the hard way that the connection between being an early employee of a successful company and going to be a great hire at your company is tenuous at best.
- One of the most underrated hiring signals, especially for more junior employees, is intent. Does the candidate exhibit demonstrable intent that they are deeply interested in your work, your people, your values and your brand? My bet is that if you truly vetted for intent during the recruitment process, 9 out of 10 hires you made would become exceptional hires. And compared to the mean, that’s a pretty good strike rate.
Simulations / case studies:
- So you’ve educated your candidate pipeline and vetted that candidate pool using better hiring signals. What’s the final step?
- I strongly believe in the use of simulations or case studies during the recruitment process.
- When you get down to your final few candidates, you want to give them an opportunity to road test working with your team and the problems your company is focused on solving. And vice versa, you want to be able to see the candidate in action before you commit to hiring them.
- This is undoubtedly the most interesting and illuminating part of any recruitment process. Understanding the way a candidate thinks, communicates, builds in a live setting can’t be replicated. It’s obviously crucially important for the employer to see them in action, but equally important for the candidate to see their new potential team and company in action. So any great case study or simulation requires active participation from both sides.

Rick’s Nuggets

Values
- Own who you are & your environment
- Does the candidate “get” your values. If not, let them go
Evidence over “feel”
- Train interviewers to extract evidence to support their decisions
- Discovery call & Interview
- Record and document the data
Desire it
- Does the person want what you offer
- Is there value in your opportunity for the individual?
- Does the candidate recognize and feed back the value
  - “ What's in it for me”

Key Takeaways that the Audience can plug into their business today! (Value):

Educate your candidate pipeline. Figure out how you can adopt a ‘train then hire’ model so that you’re attracting high-intent candidates who truly want to work at your company.
Look for better hiring signals. Stop and think about whether the signals you are currently using truly connect to long-term success. Instead of pedigree, college, GPA, who they know, look for signals such as motivation, demonstrable intent and true capability.
Use case studies and simulations for your very best candidates. It’s a super illuminating exercise for both you and the candidate to figure out if you are truly a good match.

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